Archives

Follow us on Twitter

Cholesterol paper duplicated; “The authors believed that they had taken the necessary steps to withdraw.”

A review journal is pulling a 2013 article about advances in researchers’ understanding of cholesterol after seeing the same article in another journal.

Although the retracted paper appeared first — online in Biological Reviews in February, 2013 — the journal decided to retract it after learning the authors had initially submitted it elsewhere. The first submission was eventually published (with the exception of one author) in 2014 in Frontiers in Bioscience.

The authors say they “believed that they had taken the necessary steps to withdraw their paper from Frontiers in Bioscience before they submitted to Biological Reviews in June 2012.” Here’s more from the retraction notice:

The above article, published online on 28 February 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor in Chief, William Foster, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to the publication of a similar paper by the same authors (with the exclusion of P Mardones) in Frontiers in Bioscience in January 2014. The authors believed that they had taken the necessary steps to withdraw their paper from Frontiers in Bioscience before they submitted to Biological Reviews in June 2012.

The study, “Advances in the physiological and pathological implications of cholesterol,” detailed how understanding the basic biology of cholesterol has led to pharmaceutical advances, and called for further research. It was authored by scientists from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago.

The retracted paper has been cited seven times and the Frontiers in Bioscience version has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve asked for statements from both journals and reached out to the corresponding author on both papers, Victor Cortes. We’ll update with any reply.